An alternative to the "GRAB EVERY MINOR RACE TRANSFORMATION" meta

[minor yew]

I've seen people complain about the current state of race transformations and how picking as many minor races as you can fit in a run is considered mandatory.

I don't necessarily agree on the mandatory side of things, but I do agree that, having 20 different minor transformations and 8 major ones, it's pretty hard from an RP perspective to fit more than 1-3 minor transformations, depending on your choice of major transformation. I do however agree that it's true that you're likely to fall behind the other empires on some aspects if you don't stack a minimum amount of minor transformations and a major one on top.

While some might say that "if you wanna RP, deal with the mechanical consequences", and in most scenarios I'd be inclined to agree, I think in AoW4 there is room to provide an entirely different route to pick from. I humbly bring you the very rough concept of:

THE TOME OF PURITY
A tier III Order/Nature tome based around the idea of giving your units buffs/enchantments that become weaker/less effective the more transformations your units have, and debuffs/traits with an increased effect the more transformations your enemy's units have.

(More details and examples below)

• Aura of Purity: Enchantment, racial units. Units gain 10% damage, 4 defense and 4 resistance. This effect is reduced by 25% for every minor transformation the target unit has, and by 50% if they have a major transformation, to a minimum of no effect (won't go negative).

• Evolutionary Bloat: World Map Debuff, Army. Target enemy army racial units have -5 to movement for 2 world turns, with another -5 for every minor transformation, and -10 if they have a major one.

• Curse of Atavism: Combat Debuff, enemy racial units. For 1 turn, unit at the center hex has all it's minor and major racial transformations entirely suppressed. Units within 1 hex only have their minor racial transformations suppressed.

• Ritual of Regression: Spell, race. Choose a minor transformation to remove from a race in your empire.

• Champion of Purity: Hero Trait. +1 damage of a random element for each minor transformation damaged enemies have. +2 if they have a major transformation.

• Shrine to Purity: Province Improvement. +15 Knowledge, +5 stability. No penalties if all adjacent province improvements are of the same type, -20% effect for every different type of adjacent province improvement. Counts as a Research Post.

I want to make it very clear: The idea of this tome is not to give advantage against different races, a concept that would get your average WH40k fan excited. I don't and never will condone such a concept. Unnecesary comment meant as a joke for 40k fans, while trying to explain I'm not racist to people who wouldn't have thought of that in the first place. If I were to rewrite it, it'd be something more on the lines of "If you want to roleplay 40k's Imperium of Man, this ain't the tome for you", and continue with the next paragraph.

From an RP perspective, this is more of a body-purist society that sees magical alterations of the body beyond what nature has granted them with (enchantments are fine, they are togglable) as a degradation of the body. From a game design perspective, the idea instead is to provide the option of a different playstyle that doesn't incentivize stacking half a dozen transformations on your race, while helping you keep up the pace in relation to races that do.

Furthermore, what I consider to be the meat of this tome is the Aura of Purity, which doesn't outright cease to function if you take one or two transformations, but allows you to stay at a more or less constant power level if you decide to take only a select few of them. An interesting outcome of building an empire with this mindset is that, instead of slapping every single race in your empire with all your transformations, you could have a multi-race empire with dedicated transformations for each race. Earthkin for sturdy dwarves to use as shield units, Spawnkin for your Insectoids with ceasless cacophony to stack evasion with fumble chance in your shock or skirmishers, or Joy Syphoners/Reveler's Heart on your cold-blooded lizardfolk for a morale engine unit. Does it imply more micro? Yes. Does it allow for a different playstyle that doesn't rely on just making a 14 year old kid's first OC, like a Fire Ice Metal Demon Wolf race? Also yes.

[ruby quartz]

"The idea of this tome is not to give advantage against different races, a concept that would get your average WH40k fan excited. I don't and never will condone such a concept."

Your attack on WH40K fans was uncalled for, but that's only part of the problem. This whole section of your post is unnecessary - everything you wrote above makes it very clear there's no racist undertones in what you propose. This "racism bad, WH40K fans bad, but I'm not like that, I'm good!" part adds nothing of value and in fact comes off as virtue signaling. This is not how you get people interested in your suggestion - quite the opposite.

[minor yew]

When I came up with the concept, I immediately felt icky about the implications it might have, especially with the word "Purity" at it's core. I'm not a native english speaker, and unfortunately couldn't think of a better word to embody what I wanted the tome to be, not without resorting to "the tome of [insert an entire phrase here]". As I wrote the concept and the spell/trait ideas, I remembered a mod for Stellaris years ago that caught a bunch of flak for changing the human race to be all one ethnicity. The modder said it was for RP purposes, but the mod got taken down anyways, and I perfectly understand why. Now, I know it's not the same, but I felt like I needed to clarify anyways, just in case. I tend to be verbose when speaking/writing (anxiety gets the best of me when I communicate and I talk/write too much) but mostly because I want to make the chances of misunderstandings to be as close to 0% as possible. On a separate note, I thought the comment contrasting it with 40k's Imperium would be well recieved by 40K fans as a lighthearted joke. I now clearly see I got the opposite result. When put together, and pointed out by you, I clearly see how it comes out as virtue signaling and throwing the 40k community under the bus. It was never my intent to do either. I'll ammend the original post. I'm sorry for derrailing my original point with this, I hope there's still space to discuss the tome's concepts, or alternatives to them. Thanks for pointing it out instead of just scrolling by.

[hollow bison]

The wokes will oneday realize that they are the actual racists all along

[ruby quartz]

Yeah, I too remember that Stellaris controversy. I also understand where you're coming from in terms of feeling the need to clarify everything - I used to frequent Twitter and in such places people love to take everything out of context and assume the worst.
This place is thanksfully different, people are pretty chill, there's no "look everyone, that person said X they must be Y! Grab your pitchforks!" kind of mentality. There are also no bigots from what I saw, people aren't using AoW4 faction builder as a tool of mocking real world groups of people.
You're new here so you couldn't know about any of that and that's OK. Thank you for acknowledging the criticism.

As per your idea, I think it's pretty cool - we have ways of countering buffs and unit enchantments, it would make perfect sense to also have something against racial transformations. The idea of having many specialized races sound interesting too (guess that should go well with tome of Subjugation).
I would love to see something like this in AoW4!

[minor yew]

Nailed it in the head with Subjugation! Looking at what it has to offer, it is all about morale damage or stealing units... and then you have the Baron's Palace lol. I've looked at it from every angle, and I see how you can squeeze a lot out of it to make your capital into a production powerhouse, but at the end of the day you will really only use it on builds where you do two things:

• You don't use racial units (or at least you won't use annexed cities for unit production and expect your capital/main race cities to handle all of it),
• and you're actually annexing cities instead of vassalizing or razing them.
  Purity would allow for a more flexible approach where you could actually use racial units from multiple races, without one being vastly stronger than the rest, or without you needing to cast every evolution for every race in your realm. Again, some assembly required in terms of the micro of analyzing what evolutions synergize better with each race you run into and if they work with your planned tome path, but once you have your choices made, it's just a matter of remembering what city makes which units, and you're good to go!

[pure whale]

I feel like instead of a race thing, an elegant solution to the matter of minor race transformations is something akin to their bodies mutating and struggling to control all of the magic going on inside of them, effectively like a sort of magic cancer. The actual mechanical effect would be a minor, but stacking debuff to your race of some sort (Health? Morale? Growth Speed? EXP to level? Not super relevant in the conceptual stage) thereby rewarding people who are selective with their race transformations vs people who make an entire race of demigods

[modern plank]

I like this.

[tawny forum]

I think this is a step In the right direction. Rather than having a tome as a band-aid to the boring meta, introduce something universal. Although I wouldn’t say this rewards players, rather it penalizes players who do go with a meta play style. I’d suggest something like buffs for alternative playstyles similar to HyperNova’s original concept. I just don’t think a tome is the way to go, it requires taking on affinities you may not want, research and casting spells just so you don’t have to do something.

[pure whale]

The issue is that it's difficult to reward people to NOT do something. Maybe there could be some game theory-esque scenario where people are rewarded for having LESS minor race transformations than the player with the most, stacking appropriately -- nobody gets any buffs if everyone has the same amount of minor race transformations, but the moment someone decides to not pick one up they get access to that buff

although this idea unfortunately falls apart in multi-race empires as those empires have their cake and eat it, too

[pearl galleon]

IMO some upgrades in another path that only apply if you're not doing something else would be good for this, like optional branch of empiretree?. say an empire tree upgrade that gives bonus to racial units without transforms? could add boni for other suboptimal but flavourful ways to play (the idea being, if you're running transforms, you don't pick that upgrade & spend imperium elsewhere)

[potent tinsel]

I'd like it way more if transformations, both minor and major, were applied on a unit basis. Allowing the player to really customize their army. For example, a paladin faction with angels as their strongest unit (+ we should be allowed to produce non-transformed too). I'd also bring old AoW mechanic of elements cancelling each other (you can either go water or fire, not both).

[hidden grove]

I do like the idea of an alternative to stacking transformations. It's kind of too obviously the best choice at the moment.

[cinder hemlock]

An experience penalty definitely sounds the best in my opinion

[plucky egret]

I think I generally agree with this sentiment. As someone who has every minor transformation stacked on my ‘ruler’ I can still acknowledge that minor transformations/transformation stacking needs a bit of bounding. Is it fun to walk around being op? Yes. Does it give me meaningful choices? No. I think the second one is ultimately more important for a game health/longevity aspect. I’m not sure if there should just be a hard cap or a soft cap (as measured through penalties). There is the route of providing benefits to people who don’t stack a bunch, but that seems sort of convoluted and difficult to implement (do we get bonuses at game start when we have no transformations? When someone else gets one—in which case now it feels like a penalty for them to grab it + is unintuitive?). Ultimately, if we do want to address this, I think directly penalizing/limiting racial transformation stacking is the way to go. The challenge is this goes against the initial AoW4 design philosophy of ‘unlimited choice’, which, again, brings both good (crazy builds/creativity/player freedom) and bad (lack of meaningful/real choices/ ‘sameyness’/OP stuff).

[honest kite]

I like the idea.
Just a few ideas:

• A transformation is not normally something desired by the race undergoing it. A cumulative effect of loss of morale for units (effect on combat) and loss of stability for the empire (effect over the long term, you end up with strong units but an unstable empire) could be considered? And what's more, this option goes in the direction of the game = ‘more choice for the player’.
• A sort of cumulative cancer that would manifest itself in a loss of life points for units (effect on combat, to the point of having ultra-transformed units with low vitality), plus a loss of lifespan for your people, which could manifest itself in a drop in population income, also cumulative.
  These two effect can also be both present in game.

[cinder hemlock]

I also wouldn’t mind just having more transformations that aren’t compatible with each other similarly to how super growth isn’t compatible with spawnkin. In particular I’m looking at things like frostling transformation and scions of flame. I prefer the idea of cumulative morale and/or stability penalties but that makes the dark culture naturally resistant to this penalty

[plucky egret]

The idea of more mutually exclusive transformations is an interesting angle I hadn't considered. I feel like that would add more 'choice' rather than a complete shmorgasboard of things. Again--that needs to be balanced around being too restrictive, as well. All in balance 🤞.

[torpid meteor]

I think a combo/synergy system that rewards picking two transformations with a unique bonus which you loose when you pick a third would be good.
Still leaves all the other options open and if you want you can still stack transformations if you desire.

[cinder hemlock]

I like this idea. That’d give a way to limit without a hard limit

[lament void]

Someone else mentioned adding some kind of penalty, a great one would be your race ends up like the chaos spawn from warhammer, just a horrible amalgamation of everything, very strong but not much else, maybe hurts research and economy but your u its are very powerful in combat

[plucky egret]

I also think this is an interesting direction. I like the idea of creating more interaction/'choices' rather than just limiting things or penalizing them too directly. Ultimately a hard cap (3 minor, 1 major?) could also work, but I feel like that should be a last resort if other creative options just sort of don't work out/play well.

Not too big a fan of the chaos spawn/mutation theme 😆. I feel like we want to feel good about applying transformations to our race, not bad! lol. Alternatively, a chaos-spawn/mutant transformation could be its own transformation (like Gloomstrider), but I feel like the angle of making transformations inherently volatile/mutate-ey comes from a place of wanting to punish transformations/transformation stacking rather than creating interesting choices and balancing the game.

[pearl galleon]

I feel like an efffect active with no/low numbers of transforms innately would just buff everything in the early game tbh. I'd rather add a buff with no visuals that has effects that reduce in power based on the number of other active transforms, either in a new optional branch of the empire tree or default tome research (like wayfinder, enchanted crow companion) that has later prerequisites before it appears.

(so, if you do intend to go heavily into transforms you can choose to spend the imperium/research elsewhere, & so its still something you have to unlock as the game progresses)

[wise drum]

I feel like a mix of both would be best, unique bonuses that are lost if more additions are thrown into the mix, destabilizing the system, rewards players for sticking to less add-ons, and at the same time it seems weird to me that I can force a races skin to take on the aspects of leaves, steel, stone and gold (I know goldtouched isn't named gold skin but that seems to be the main thing the transformation is doing) all at the same time.

I mean I get it, it's MAGIC, but still, maybe one...two skins at a time? And with 2 seasons of content (hopefully more) I feel like there will be enough transformations to do both systems.